04. pamphleter

"All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." - Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

I'm standing on this corner. Can't get their attention. Facing rush hour faces turned around. I clutch my stack of paper, press one to a chest, then watch it swoop and stutter to the ground. I'm weary with right-angles, abbreviated daylight, and waiting for a winter to be done. Why do I still see you in every mirrored window, in all that I could never overcome? How I don't know what I should do with my hands when I talk to you. How you don’t know where you should look, so you look at my hands. How movements rise and then dissolve, melted by our shallow breath. How causes dance away from me. I am your pamphleteer. I walk this room in time to the beat of the Gestetner, contemplate my next communique. The rhetoric and treason of saying that I'll miss you. Of saying "Hey, well maybe you should stay." Sing "Oh what force on earth could be weaker than the feeble strength of one *" like me remembering the way it could have been. Help me with this barricade. No surrender. No defeat. A spectre's haunting Albert Street. I am your pamphleteer.

* Ralph Chaplin, Solidarity Forever, 1916.

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